After almost 4 decades (!) on the air, it’s a little silly to describe any given SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE episode, or even season, as “critical” or “vital.”  Nevertheless, this is a big transition year for the show, with such veterans as Bill Hader, Jason Sudeikis and Fred Armisen (on top of Kristin Wiig the […]

  Every year the Oscars flail around searching for a host, a theme, a tone–anything to make its annual 4 hours of primetime cohere instead of congeal–and every year THE TONY AWARDS make it look relatively easy.  This wasn’t a great year for Broadway–swamped with family- and tourist-friendly musical extravaganzas and star vehicles, its serious […]

  We’re gradually discovering that Steven Soderbergh’s definition of “retirement” from filmmaking is a fairly narrow one.  It was recently announced that he plans to direct a new series for Cinemax, and he has another cable/online series in development.  It appears that the one thing he won’t be doing for the foreseeable future is directing […]

  Watching the parade of Kristen Wiig’s Greatest Hits that marked her return to SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE as tonight’s host, you could be forgiven for wishing you missed her more.  For all her great talent, Wiig had become, by the time she left a year ago, a symbol of everything franchise-heavy and headpoundingly overdone on […]

  There was an inspired, unexpected piece of comedy toward the end of tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, although it was pretty lonely in the mostly bland context of the rest of the episode.  Early in the post-Update half-hour, host Zach Galifianakis did a sketch called “Darrell’s House,” where he played an intense guy named Darrell […]

  It took 84 minutes before SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE aired a single franchise sketch tonight.  That’s 84 minutes of non-stop, uninterrupted originality from the writing staff, working without the nets of familiar characters or predetermined catchphrases.  If that’s not a record, it had to be close.  (And even though the last sketch of the night […]

  SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE usually benefits from having a host with the confident comic talent that Melissa McCarthy brings to the table, but even with a 3-week hiatus in its pocket, the writing staff came up with little that was up to her level.  The result was a very long 90 minutes. Almost everything that […]

  It took me just under 6 weeks to get through the 13 hours of HOUSE OF CARDS, the first original Netflix series.  That’s a little less than half the time a regular weekly run would have taken, although nowhere near the weekend binge-viewing that some were planning when all the episodes of Season 1 […]